Hello from Ellen
Ellen with some new Indian friends
We're up in the Himalayas now, Ladakh. Absolutely stunning. This morning, I went to two (smallish) mountaintop monasteries and one stupa on the top of a mountain. The stupa was at six am and kind of winded me for our schlepping around later on. Still, there's an exhilaration and lightness and beauty being up so high, the colors painted on the Buddhist images are that much more vibrant and the landscape is stunning--a lot of barren brown gigantic mountains with a few snow peaks left (global warming?) and then brilliant patches of green in the irrigated parts of the valleys. We went to a school for Tibetan refugee children, but need to go back tomorrow, since they were expecting us in the morning. So, standing in the parking lot of an already stark landscape, I started playing with three or four little boys, drawing a line in the dry dirt with a pointed stone, and leaping over it to see how far we could jump.
After a few rounds, they threw down their knapsacks to participate in the game in greater earnest. Then we tried to move to hopscotch, but they were reluctant to give that a shot till just before it was time for us to get back into our jeep caravan. They wore earnest little school uniforms, hopelessly losing the battle of orderliness that late in the day in such a dusty place. Beautiful chocolate brown eyes and rosy cheeks and gorgeously open smiles.
Yesterday, we went to the Ladakhi Women's Alliance and got a better idea of some of community development challenges in the valley, and then there are the threats to traditional rural practices and a delicate balance of resources in the face of increasing migration of Kashmiri shopkeepers, Indian merchants, and all of us tourists, among other things.